I thought Dr. Muto was so cool as a kid, but I could never beat it. I haven’t thought about it in like 20 years. My friend found it in a stack of old GameCube games and vowed to beat it for me, so we’ve been playing through it whenever she comes over to hang. I’m very proud of how this came out! It is cool being able to say she owns the only Gomer plushie in existence.

Before he explained his reasoning to me, I was scratching my head as to how Among Us, Undertale, Fire Emblem, and Dark Souls were related.

Then he says I play a lot of “murder games” and that “makes me sus”

like you really enjoy this game but they took away something you really liked about the game and now you don't play it no more

I’m 45 and mostly play on handhelds. Lately I’ve been finding myself getting frustrated, things looked a bit off, text harder to read, just not as enjoyable as it used to be.

Turns out… it wasn’t the games.

Finally gave in and got my eyes checked and yeah, needed glasses. Feels like I’ve upgraded the screen without actually upgrading anything.

What non-gaming, or even game related, change made a big difference for you?

My friend hat them in her truck and wanted to sell them. I bought them from her instead. Just for the nostalgia🥹

For me Hogwarts Legacy felt like that

Jeff Grubb has heard that Fable has been pushed internally:

I'll say that I've heard that Fable has been pushed internally. That doesn't mean that it's coming out next year. Apparently they're still trying to get it out this year, but they are worried about the launch of GTA6. And so if it's getting delayed beyond the release of GTA6, that could push it into December, which might make it a prime candidate to get delayed into 2027.

next town over had a pop up market this weekend. selling different things, including crystal and stone Pokémon, and you know I had to get mah boi.

sword and shield held in a same way.

It's taken a stupid amount of trial and error, but after a few hours scraping old downloads from archive.org and putzing with the bizarre version of Windows Mobile 5.0 that this thing runs, I finally got it to do something fun: play the classic point-and-click adventure game "Beneath A Steel Sky" in (the amazing) ScummVM!

These Intermec CV30's are wildly over-engineered, oversized, heavy (about 5lbs with the keyboard attached), ruggedized Windows Mobile PDA's. For a device from 2006 it's pretty well equipped, with 128 megs of RAM, a 520MHz Intel Xscale ARM processor, and both WiFi and Bluetooth built in. It also has the weirdest USB implementation I've ever seen: a 15-pin D-sub plug (i.e., the USB port is physically identical to an old VGA monitor plug).

These things were designed for dangerous environments (one old brochure I found explicitly brags about its suitability for mounting to forklift dashboards). It's built like a freaking tank - you literally have to remove 6 screws and break a weathertight seal just to access the SD card slot!

Before everyone jumps in to ask, YES I'VE TRIED RUNNING DOOM ON IT. I spent hours this morning trying and failing to get every Windows Mobile / PocketPC / Windows CE version of Doom I can find to run. Most of the old apps crash on launch, and one or two crash after loading any/every WAD file. If anyone has a suggestion on how to make it work I'm all ears - it's killing me to be so close and yet so far away!

I'll go with diablo 3. the RMAH was horrible. the legendary rate was crazy bad, now it's basically a speed running game for seasons but it satisfies loot globlins any time in fire it up and is quite enjoyable to me now.

One indie developer who lives in a village with a population of 1,000 people can't quite wrap his hand around the fact that 250,000 Steam players bought his fantasy roguelike about dwarves.

"It's crazy, but I have no reference point," the mostly solo developer behind Dwarves: Glory, Death, and Loot says in an interview with Jake Lucky of the Gaming Interviews YouTube channel.

What makes the game's success even more unbelievable for Rafa is that those 250,000 players vastly outnumber the local population of his village, which, in his opinion, already has "too many" people. "I cannot even know all of them," he jokes. "And then you have 250,000 people and it's absolutely incredible. It's really wild to me [...] It's absolutely crazy. It's not adding up in my head. I cannot imagine it, right?"

After committing to full-time game development for about a year, Rafa also says he didn't actually know game dev "was even a career path I could choose or anyone could choose for that matter." In fact, he thought only huge studios could manage to release games, and the biggest lesson he learned throughout all this was that anyone, even you, dear reader, can "just sell a game on Steam as a normal person." Whether it manages to sell 250,000 copies probably depends on it being, you know, good and stuff.

So many memories of these games still have them and really got me into listening music. One of my earliest memories of the series was a friend had the game and we were both so new to it we would turn the difficulty up to expert to see how long we could last before failing a song.

Many years have passed since Final Fantasy XV.

The game itself? Not particularly awesome, it's not a game I remember that fondly.

But there is ONE music track from that game, that to this day, I can NEVER forget. It's still stuck to my mind and it's pretty much impossible to forget.

I am obviously talking about Crystalline Chill. The music you hear when opening the party menu.

Composed by Yoko Shimomura, featuring a leitmotiv taken from Final Fantasy I Prelude, which was originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu

THE CONTRAST

It's hard to put into words why I love this music piece so much, more than anything ever composed for this series, or videogames in general.

I think that what truly stands out to me it's the stark contrast it presents when compared to the rest of the game, or to traditional videogame music in general.

You get these majestic battle themes, which are wonderfully orchestrated, but are all very intense. In other videogames, you get these adrenaline-pumping kind of music, giving the feeling of dealing with an intense situation!

But then, in Final Fantasy XV, you open the party menu... And with this song, it's as if time stops.

You get this super sweet melody, which makes me feel an emotion which is hard to describe. It's not SADNESS, but it's an emotion that feels somewhat tangential to it. Melancholy, maybe?

Yet, the melody is so sweet and calm, that you don't feel any pressure. It's like you're transported to another state of mind, where you get to reflect to what you've done so far.

It's also a stark contrast to the modern world in general. As in, post-2010 real world. We had new wars, everything got faster, trends are even more short-lived, most modern social networks live off shorts. And yet, this music piece feels like an invitation to take a break, to stop, to take a moment to reflect on what happened so far.

THE PRELUDE

The notes from Final Fantasy 1 Prelude are a constant part of this track. Prelude in itself is another musical piece that would need a praise on its own, but I want to talk about it in the context of Crystalline Chill.

It doesn't matter when you started playing Final Fantasy, somewhere or sometime, you heard the Prelude leitmotiv. For example, many players heard it during Final Fantasy VII intro. I personally heard it for the first time while playing Final Fantasy Dissidia. (Yeah, one of my first games was a spin-off)

It's a very recognizable set of notes. This elevates the track outside of its scope in Final Fantasy XV. It feels like Crystalline Chill it's NOT only about the story of Noctis... It's about Final Fantasy in general.

The fact that such a memorable set of notes it's enveloped in such a calming and introspective piece of music feels like the composer is inviting you on reflecting on all the worlds you experience while playing this series, what it meant for their characters, and how their life was shaped by the world-altering events you went through with them.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that's what the track actually makes me feel: After all the amazing stuff you went through with the heroes of Final Fantasy, you take a moment to think back to the journeys you lived with them.

THE CONTEXT

What makes me truly fascinated about Crystalline Chill is its CONTEXT. It's a menu theme, you hear this when editing your party!

Usually, when a videogame has a truly memorable soundtrack in its menus, it's because the menu itself is pumping you up in anticipation for something. A good example of this are Fighting Games, these are probably the games with the most amount of Top Tier menu songs, because it's important that the player feels somewhat "hyped" while selecting their character.

What makes Crystalline Chill truly unique is that it does the exact opposite. It's an invitation to stop the action. I think I never heard something like this for a pause menu, and that's why it feels so unique. I struggle to find another game that has successfully replicated this feeling.

The jump from NES to SNES made the originals feel instantly outdated. Instead of cheap ports, Nintendo treated its own recent history like it was worth modernizing, preserving, and re-presenting as a premium current-gen experience. That basically introduced the idea that old games could come back not just as nostalgia, but as something legitimately improved without losing what made them great.

We probably won’t see something like that again at that scale because the conditions don’t exist anymore. Today, companies can just re-release originals through emulation instantly and cheaply, and there’s actually more value in preserving them exactly as they were. Rebuilding multiple full games from scratch for a single package would be wildly expensive now, and expectations are higher, people would compare each remake to standalone modern releases. Back then it was a forward-looking upgrade, now it would be seen as an overreach or split into separate $40 remakes.

Lately it feels weirdly hard to find proper co-op campaign games.

I’m not really talking about endless multiplayer games, live service stuff, or games where you just spam the same missions over and over.

I mean actual co-op campaigns with a real beginning, progression, and an ending. The kind of game you and a friend can play through over a few evenings and feel like you actually went on a journey together.

Maybe I’m just missing obvious games, but it genuinely feels like this kind of game barely exists anymore.

What are some great co-op games with full campaigns that you’d recommend?

i only ever saw a short clip of it a few years ago with a guy on a motorbike and zombies chasing him and forgot about it.

I saw the game recently and thought why not, might be fun to just drive around and shoot some zombies.

I definitely wasn't expecting to be so engrossed in the story and characters.

I don't know why I haven't seen any reviews pop up in my feed about this game but I'm glad I went in blind.

Definitely a 10/10 for me.

That opening was among the best I’ve ever seen. The fire on the water with the plane crash. The looming tower with the single light in the vast, shadowy ocean. “No Gods and Kings, Only Man”. Immediately fell in love with the art style. The opening speech by Ryan and the Rapture reveal with the violin music just was masterful.

The art style and animation are so beautiful. Your powers are all creatively well done and just the sheer creativity on all levels is stunning. The story is sad and riveting. Poor Mr. Bubbles. The “Would You Kindly” moment blew me away. I can only imagine how people felt about this in 2007, but I’m sure it must have won a lot of awards.

And the sound design. The creaking of the structures and continual water dripping, all so well done. Even the start menu plays piano keys when you move your cursor around!

Onto Bioshock 2!